Gov. Pedro P. Tenorio yesterday pressed the Attorney General\u2019s Office to pursue the recommendations of the Office of the Public Auditor which called for the prosecution of government officials who were found to have misspent public funds.<\/p>\n
The governor made the call, the first since he assumed office in January, in another attempt to strengthen accountability of officials holding public office.<\/p>\n
The public auditor\u2019s office has flooded the AGO with recommendations seeking punishment of officials who have erred in the past for ignoring procurement regulations to mishandling of government money.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf…they disregard the law they should be prosecuted. I\u2019m sorry it\u2019s sad but we cannot arbitrarily spend public funds,\u201d Tenorio told reporters, without giving specific cases, but added that OPA\u2019s reports are being reviewed by the office of the attorney general.<\/p>\n
Recently OPA has recommended that legal action be taken against Antonio R. Cabrera for misconduct in public office when he was finance secretary during the administration of former governor Froilan C. Tenorio.<\/p>\n
The audit report said Finance Secretary Lucia Nielsen should recover money from Cabrera amounting to $100,429 which he mishandled from 1995 to 1997.<\/p>\n
According to the public auditor\u2019s office, up to $30,000 were illegally disbursed for travel advances, about $66,000 reimbursement for questionable official representation, and another $3,667 for other expenses.<\/p>\n
The AGO has yet to act on a report submitted by OPA months ago which sought legal action against former officials of the defunct Marianas Visitors for entering into a string of questionable contracts with eight foreign companies between 1992 and 1998.<\/p>\n
The report said the tourism office violated procurement rules and regulations that led to illegal expenditures totaling to $14.2 million during the six-year period, including a controversial advertising deal with Japanese I&S Corporation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gov. Pedro P. Tenorio yesterday pressed the Attorney General\u2019s Office to pursue the recommendations of the Office of the Public Auditor which called for the prosecution of government officials who were found to have misspent public funds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}